I Am Sitting in a Room Revisited

My remake of the Alvin Lucier artwork I Am Sitting in a Room was released 10 years ago today. To mark this occasion I want to revisit how I made it and troubles I had remaking it for 2019.

In November 2019 I Am Sitting in a Room was exhibited at Gamerz Festival in Aix-en-Provence in France. It was a pretty nice surprise to be invited to exhibit that piece, especially as it was made in 2010 and hasn’t been exhibited since aroudn 2015.

The festival’s organiser, Quentin, asked if I could remake the film in HD resolution, which is 1920×1080/16:9 aspect ratio. The original video was made in the very odd resolution of 1440×1152, which is 4:3 aspect ratio. In any normal situation using filmed footage, this could be an impossible task. If you wanted to convert 4:3 to 16:9 you’d either have to stretch the footage or crop it and lose information. See these examples below:

Crop to fit

Stretch to fit

For I Am Sitting in a Room in theory this isn’t a problem as the piece is black text against a white background. So, I would just need to make the background larger and center the text.

Before going into the problems I faced remaking the piece in 16:9 it’s worth going over how it was made. Back in 2010 my programming skills were, to be blunt, crap. Making this piece required me to learn a lot about Linux, loops, automation and bash programming. Also back in 2010 I wasn’t that good at documenting my processes and so looking back at my source files some of them were not in a good state or were just missing. So, part of the following is pieced together from memory and what remains on my hard drives.

In 2009 I wrote about “glitching” SVG files and became really interested in that as a format to work with. Even today I like working with SVGs as they’re highly editable and can be used in many ways (vinyl cutting, plotting, laser printing, screen printing, web design etc).

If you’ve ever done any glitching via the command line you’ll know that you can utilise sed to automate the glitching of files. sed didn’t quite work on SVGs as it would always destroy them and so I asked Garry Bulmer to write a script to glitch SVG files. It worked great and left the SVGs in an editable state.

At some point later it was brought to my attention that font glyphs are formed in the same way as vector files in that the glyphs are made up of paths and nodes, hence why they are infinitely scalable. SVG fonts was/is a specification for, well, representing fonts as an SVG file. So, if I could convert a font to SVG then in theory I could glitch it!

First I needed a font to work with. The very popular Ubuntu font wasn’t out at that point and so I opted to use Liberation Sans. It’s a free font and had a lot of glyphs.

Using FontForge I converted the font to an SVG font (File > Generate Fonts). I then used the glitch script from Garry Bulmer in a way like so:

#!/bin/bash
no=1
while [ $no -le 1001 ]
do
echo $no
./glitch 0.1 < font.svg > font.svg
cp font dataface_$no.svg
no=`expr $no + 1`
done

Then I had a folder of 1002 SVG fonts. I needed to turn them back to ttf files and so used the follwing font forge scrpt to convert them back to ttfs

#!/usr/local/bin/fontforge
Open($1)
Generate($1:r + ".ttf")

And ran it over the whole folder with this cript

#!/bin/bash
no=1
while [ $no -le 1001 ]
do
echo $no
fontforge -script convert_font_fontforge.pe dataface_$no.svg
no=`expr $no + 1`
done

Finally, I generated the frames used for the video by creating an SVG file with the text in that uses the Liberation Sans font. For each frame I swapped the font file with the next one which was a bit glitchier:

#!/bin/sh
no=1
while [ $no -le 1001 ]
do
echo $no
sudo rm /home/hellocatfood/.fonts/*.ttf
cp /home/hellocatfood/Desktop/dataface_$no.ttf /home/hellocatfood/.fonts/
convert /home/hellocatfood/Desktop/glitch.svg /home/hellocatfood/Desktop/glitch_$no.jpg
no=`expr $no + 1`
done

ta da! Not a very elegant soluion but it was 2010. And it worked! The result you already saw at the beginning of this blog post. So, to make a HD version of it, in theory all I need to do was create an SVG file that was 16:9/1920×1080 and repeat this process. Here’s the result of that process:

Yikes! Not at all like the original.

You may be asking why I don’t just convert the text to paths (Ctrl + Shift + C in Inkscape). That would do away with the need to generate 1002 font files. Here’s what that would have looked like:

However, it differs from the original in one unique way. Once the glitches start there’s a lot of random question marks that appear and float down he screen. I don’t know why this happen but I suspect that Imagemagick doesn’t know how to interpret the glitched glyphs and so produces and error.

There are also some frames which fail to render the font at all and in a couple of instances render a serif font!

The results in the original are not consistent, but the piece is an exploration of glitches and so whatever glitch was produced is whatever glitch I used. So there.

Therefore, any remake which didn’t look like the original wouldn’t be faithful to the original, and I simply didn’t want to exhibit a compromised video.

One promising solution which – TL;DR – didn’t work was to try and replicate the environment I made the original work in. That is, to try and replicate an Ubuntu computer from 2010. I booted up Ubuntu 10.10 on a virtual machine (using Virtual Box) and got to work.

Ubuntu 10.10

Imagemagick was failing to read the font files and so I used GIMP on the command line to read and convert the SVG to pngs.

gimp -n -i -b - <<EOF
(let* ( (file's (cadr (file-glob "sitting_in_a_room.svg" 1))) (filename "") (image 0) (layer 0) )
(while (pair? file's)
(set! image (car (gimp-file-load RUN-NONINTERACTIVE (car file's) (car file's))))
(set! layer (car (gimp-image-merge-visible-layers image CLIP-TO-IMAGE)))
(set! filename (string-append (substring (car file's) 0 (- (string-length (car file's)) 4)) ".png"))
(gimp-file-save RUN-NONINTERACTIVE image layer filename filename)
(gimp-image-delete image)
(set! file's (cdr file's))
)
(gimp-quit 0)
)
EOF

cp sitting_in_a_room.png images/glitch_$no.png

Which produced this result:

This method shows error characters but not the same question mark error characters that were in the original. No matter what I tried it just wasn’t working.

So, in the end unfortunately I admitted defeat and exhibited the original 4:3 video. It would be easy to blame the 2010 version of myself for not creating an air-gapped iso of Ubuntu or for not properly documenting my processes, but how was I to know that I would be revisiting the piece 10 years later! Heck, in 2010 HD resolution was still not widespread, so I was really just working with what I knew.

And really, this highlights the volatility of glitches.

Comic Sans Must Die

Comic Sans Must Die

Love it or hate it, Comic Sans is one of the most popular fonts in the world.

Vincent Connare designed the font for Microsoft in 1995. He described it is best being used for “new computer users and families with children”. Despite this it has constantly been misused and can be seen everywhere from school letters, e-mails from government officials and even in documents about the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

Since it was unleashed on the world there have been multiple calls by designers for the font to be abolished completely, most famously by the Ban Comic Sans website.

Comic Sans Must Die is a project that satisfies every designer’s dream: to see Comic Sans die a slow and painful death. Every day the individual glyphs of Comic Sans will have their demise displayed for all to see.

Comic Sans Must Die is a project conceived by me with code contributions from Richard Clifford.

Click here to view

Create your own glitch typeface

Making Dataface was really quite an exciting journey. What started off as an attempt to make a typeface inspired by glitch art turned out to be a story of collaboration, exploration and hours of research. Here, I will go through my process.

As you may have seen from my previous experiments in vector databending it’s totally possible to manipulate vector files. My original method for creating Dataface was to save each glyph in the Liberation font to an SVG file and then go through the process of glitching it for each file. Obviously this would’ve taken me a long time, hence why there was very little activity between my original announcement in January and when I started work on it again a few weeks ago.

At this time I thought about writing a script to do this for me. sed is a great command-line utility for Linux that essentially does the same as using find/replace on a character. As it’s command-line it means I can do a lot of automation with it. So, I wrote this simple script that attempted to solve the problem

#!/bin/bash
rand=$(($RANDOM % 9))
sed -i s/[0-9]/$rand/g fontfile.svg

The only problem was that it would replace all numbers in the file with whatever random value was chosen by $rand as the script was executed. Not only is this bad because it would result in a lot of strangely similar glyphs but also because it would modify the header data of the font file, thus rendering it unreadable. I soon remembered that recently the SVG Font specification was finished, which aided my cause by putting all of the glyphs in one big file, but I still couldn’t find a way to efficiently randomise values in the file.

Thankfully fizzPOP came to my rescue. I’m glad that hackerspaces have people with a range of abilities in hardware and software, as I was soon presented with a solution to my problem by GB. After a few revisions he created a script that would replace only specific values in the file and wold even let you specify how much it should be randomised. You can download the finished script and source files and have a go for yourself.

Click to download

 

Simplified instructions on compiling the script:

  • Unzip the file in a clean folder. This will give you three files:Font_Sample_-_Liberation_Sans.svg, glitch.l and makefile
  • Type “make” into the command line (without the quote)
  • If you haven’t got make, type:
    flex -t glitch.l >glitch.c
    gcc -o glitch glitch.c

in either case, you will get a program called “glitch”.

Please note this has only been tested on Linux, requires Flex (available in the Ubuntu repository) and it is designed to work on SVG font files. I only know FontForge that is able to create these fonts files. To run the script do the following

./glitch 0.50 outputfile.svg

That tells the script to glitch the file by 50%. I have noticed that sometimes you get errors if you put in 1.00 or more.

Once you have generated the file you can import it back into FontForge to save as a .ttf, .otf or whatever font type you choose!

(I still hate Comic Sans)

Here’s everyone’s favourite Comic Sans glitched at 50%

I Am Sitting In A Room

Inspired by Alvin Lucier‘s I Am Sitting in a Room piece I have taken Dataface one step further

In glitch art we only ever see result of the process of damaging an image, video or sound. Rarely can we observe this process as it happens within the computer in an instant. Using Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room as inspiration, in this piece I show the many steps taken to damage data to the point where it loses all meaning.

Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats this only as an attribute of the text and can understand it regardless of what font file is used or how it looks to the viewer.

In this piece I have used a script, created in collaboration with G Bulmer, that explores the font file and damages it by randomising the values that construct each glyph. The computer, doing only what it has been instructed to do, continually attacks the font files’ data to the point where it is sometimes corrupted and not even it can interpret it correctly.

The resulting video shows the gradual damaging of the data. The viewer will struggle to find meaning amongst the visual noise whilst the computer still understands it.

The full text reads:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I have typed out this text using a font called Dataface and I am going to randomise parts of the font file’s code and save the results of it again and again, until it’s appearance becomes illegible and the font file is destroyed. What you will see, then, are the effects of randomisation, with the occasional glitch that occurs when the font file is so badly damaged that the computer is unable to read it. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of my ability to edit fonts but more a way to eliminate all meaning that this text might have.

Dataface

After months of hard work I’m happy to finally release Dataface

Click to download

Special thanks go to various hackers at fizzPOP for all of their help, GB for programming help and Scribbleboy for general guidance. You can view of preview of the font here on Flickr.

There will soon be a lovely writeup of how it was done and the tools to use to create your own. Until then, I hope you enjoy Dataface!